Beijing

August 22/23, 2007
Beijing, China

After only a few hours – hotel, rest, shower, pizza (?? with Belgian ale?), a stroll in a hot night, a city like others around the world, a city like nowhere else. Clean, brightly lit buses – walls of sheet metal, red netting, green plastic – neon spangled facades with screens of flames, haute couture ads, small red bars full of dim light and beer signs and funny names. Pure Girl Bar. Funky Beat. Butterfly.

Walking past SanLiTun district, sidewalks – part dust, part shattered concrete – M*A*S*H* style green canvas tents with plastic windows line the edges of construction sites in the middle of commercial night life. Builders’ camp. Electric lights inside reveal thin, strong men stripped to the waist, squatting together around low tables, laughing, eating with dark chopsticks from communal pots.

So far this city is strangely peaceful, if you disregard the 11 million people scrambling around and the air pollution 6 times that of New York City and the chaotic traffic patterns and the constant noise…but truly, there is a serenity to it, a warm dreamy quality that hums rather than screeches. The placid faces and casual clothing indicate that all of this is pretty new to everyone – while as tourists we long for carved wooden buildings and elaborate jammie-like clothing and large-wheeled cars laden with silk, things are more like a silly manic rip-off of a large European city, complete with 40 foot signs of impossibly thin and stylish white women in dramatic poses presumably showing off the flexibility of the jeans they’re wearing, and underneath are the words: “Pleasanty Surprise of Groping.” We went to a bar last night that was upstairs from “Spring roll A-Hole.” My new mantra.

~ by knifemaker on August 27, 2007.